Critical blundering

April 26, 2012

Faulkner and Critical Blundering | By Peter LaSalle

While writing my short story, “The Lost Faulkner Sentence” (NER 32.4), I got to thinking a lot about Faulkner.

And one thing I thought of was that, yes, the twentieth century is over, and when it comes to the matter of designating the most important American novelist of that century, somebody who can truly hold his own in terms of international competition, Faulkner seems to have won the race—and by a couple of gracefully gliding, beautifully hoof-beating furlongs, as far as I’m concerned.

No need to go into extensive details of the dazzlement of the large body of his brave, innovative work and how it changed the look of fiction forever. (After the French started translating him in the 1930s, literature throughout continental Europe was never quite the same, and García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and who knows how many others in the movement that’s commonly called the Latin American Boom later bowed down nearly in unison, to acknowledge that there might not have been even a faint literary pop from that part of the world, let alone such a resounding boom of an explosion in fiction, if it hadn’t been for Faulkner.) Actually, it’s tough to argue against the fact that Faulkner remains among the handful of most significant novelists in all of our history, probably second only to Melville (and one has to wonder if Melville, for sheer originality and on the strength of the one volume alone about his metaphysical leviathan, is really second to anybody worldwide, including Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert, even Joyce, for that matter). OK, I think I’ve established my point, the greatness of Faulkner.

Now consider this.

Today Absalom, Absalom! is usually seen as the pinnacle of Faulkner’s overall achievement, a masterfully constructed bridge between modernism and postmodernism in the haunting story of Thomas Sutpen’s megalomania as he built from nothing his vast plantation empire, complete with strange Haitian slaves and a captive foppish French architect, all of it set in a sometimes very nightmarish Mississippi. Yet here is what a certain Clifton Fadiman had to say in his glib New Yorker review when the book appeared in 1936—or at least a couple of snips from the assessment:

—”the most consistently boring novel by a reputable writer to come my way during the last decade”

—”the final blow-up of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent”

Fadiman was an established critical voice of his day, chiefly remembered—if currently remembered at all—for picking out selections for the essentially middlebrow Book of the Month Club, a guy of the usual variety of supposedly urbane and witty, if maybe comfortably shallow, writer who did grace the pages of the happy-go-lucky New Yorker of that period (perhaps the sort sometimes still found there?). And I suppose it might be easy to forgive him for a gaffe like that, let a statute of limitations for book-review violations come into play.

But I definitely won’t.

If such blundering prevented even one human being from enjoying the rare, undeniably powerful experience on this earth that reading Absalom, Absalom! is, Fadiman should continue to be loudly singled out into perpetuity as the person who said what he did: we can’t be reminded of that kind of pompous and even outright dumb critical behavior enough, as a supremely valuable cautionary tale, if nothing else.

Well, as I said, in writing the NER story I did find myself thinking an awful lot about Faulkner, sometimes getting pretty worked up and huffy, I guess, in the course of that thinking, too.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Peter LaSalle’s 2007 short story collection Tell Borges if you See Him has just been reissued in paperback by University of Georgia Press. A new novel, Mariposa’s Song, which uses a single book-length sentence to tell of a young Honduran woman without documentation working as a bar girl in a rough nightclub in East Austin, Texas, is forthcoming in fall 2012 from Texas Tech University Press. His short story “The Lost Faulkner Sentence” appeared in NER 32.4.

Exquisitely, perfectly sad

April 19, 2012

In Praise of Community Orchestras | By Gregory Spatz

This winter, the adult-beginner community orchestra where my wife, Caridwen, coaches the violin sections and occasionally conducts, undertook one of the most demanding and profound pieces of music I know of: the second movement of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony. This is a piece I grew up listening to – at home, at my grandparents’ house in the Berkshires, summer evenings over their outdoor garden speakers, maybe even a time or two at Tanglewood performed by the BSO. My senior year in high school, I undertook a full-blown harmonic analysis of the piece, mainly because I wanted an excuse to dodge math class, but also because I was hoping to get to the bottom of some kind of nostalgia I’d always felt hearing it – to root that out, and maybe distance myself from it by focusing on the music’s underlying calculus and structure, rather than on the feeling-tones and idyllic pictures of willow trees and summer sunsets reflected in my grandparents’ pond, which the music always evoked for me. I doubt the analysis was very good or thorough, and I’m positive it didn’t lead me to a more meaningful appreciation of the music, but for a while after I did feel a special connection to it, a kind of ownership even, because of that attempted harmonic analysis, and I’d always type out final drafts of college papers with it blaring on my dorm room speakers (or on headphones after roommates complained).

And then I stopped listening to it altogether. Until this winter.

What surprised me, hearing it again as Caridwen worked it up, and later as the adult-beginners performed it, was how relevant it all still felt. And still (for me) steeped in nostalgia; and still, I can’t say what’s at the source of that. Some of it now, of course, is the sadness of looking back at a childhood and a whole world of people that no longer exists – feeling all of that evoked in the drama of those chords and fugue-themes and plaintive call-and-answer sections. Some of it may be inherent in the music itself, a consequence of Beethoven’s own sadness/nostalgia for the world of sound (he was mostly deaf at the time of writing it) – very probably it pulses with longing because he would only ever hear it fully in his head, and one can only imagine how badly he must have wanted to hear it played.

But the real surprise for me this winter, was in the way the community orchestra, despite the piece’s technical and emotional challenges, didn’t feel out-classed by or mismatched with the job of playing it. In fact, I felt their playing of the piece struck an earnestness of feeling that you don’t always hear from a professional orchestra, precisely because of inevitable imperfections in the performance. No question about the defects…and therefore no room in the playing for the vanity or high-gloss artistry and perfectionism that can so often cause classical music to sound fossilized, intimidating or inaccessible to the lay-listener. Did they get inside the piece and articulate it in a way Beethoven would have been pleased to hear? Probably not. But there was a pure awe and pleasure in being immersed in the music that was moving to behold. For me, that kind of engagement is the whole point of making music in the first place. I was glad to be reminded of this – and so unexpectedly, imperfectly – to feel again the power and immediacy of one of the most exquisitely, perfectly sad pieces of music I have ever heard.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Gregory Spatz has been contributing to NER’s fiction pages since 1992. His most recent book publications are the novel Inukshuk and forthcoming short story collection Half as Happy. He is the recipient of a Washington State Book Award and a 2012 NEA Fellowship in Literature, and plays fiddle in the internationally acclaimed band “John Reischman and the Jaybirds.” Visit www.gregoryspatz.com for more info.

Australian Kelpie, age 19

April 12, 2012

Isa Leshko’s “Elderly Animals” | By Kellam Ayres

Art that values quietness—that embraces understatement and restraint—has always intrigued me. I think of moments in the poems of Jane Hirshfield and Linda Gregg; Walker Evans’s portraits in rural Alabama; the paintings of Edward Hopper. I picture Hopper’s women sitting alone in rooms, or the faces of tenement farmers in Evans’s photos, and appreciate the way a work of art can mesmerize with subtlety and quiet gestures. Similarly, photographer Isa Leshko’s project, “Elderly Animals,” captivates me with its straightforward portraiture; it’s the embodiment of what I admire in an artist’s work.

The animals in these portraits have lived a very long time, sometimes under trying circumstances. The images are simple and clear. But they are not devoid of complexity; in viewing these photos I’m confronted with some of the richest themes and most difficult questions one can face as a human and an artist. Mortality weighs on us. It’s difficult to get old; awful to see loved ones suffer and die. Considering these themes, Leshko’s project could have easily veered into sentimentality, but doesn’t. How does an artist explore these issues without pulling the heart strings in an obvious and unoriginal way? And even worse than sentimentality is the potential for exploitation. How do we decide what’s appropriate to document in our photos and poems, and how do we honor our subjects? When should we leave well enough alone? Leshko’s photos urge me to consider the relationship between an artist and her subject. Is it collaborative? Has an emotional or moral agreement been made? Or is the situation one in which an outsider looks in on the “other”? And how can we answer any of these questions definitively?

In Leshko’s artist statement, she explains that “Elderly Animals” was born from a conscious decision not to photograph her own mother who was ill with Alzheimer’s disease. Instead, she turned her lens to a subject that still speaks movingly to the indignity of our minds and bodies falling apart; the harm enacted on those we care for. Just as Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish” isn’t really about fish, one could say that Leshko’s portraits are as much about mortality and resilience as they are about animals. Still, the audience is first engaged by the faces of these creatures—their clear, quiet gaze. We look directly into their eyes. We study the sheep with its patchy coat. The threadbare wing of the rooster, reminiscent of that gorgeous line in Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Hurt Hawks”—“the wing trails like a banner in defeat.” Despite the effects of time and harm, these portraits, amazingly, show animals at ease. Some appear curious; others rest in piles of hay. I admire, and am inspired by, Leshko’s ability to document the decline of vitality, while still treating her subjects with grace and dignity.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Kellam Ayres’s poems have appeared in NER and The Collagist, and are forthcoming in The Cortland Review. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Bread Loaf School of English, and works for the Middlebury College Library. Isa Leshko’s work will be on exhibit May-June at the Houston Center for Photography, in Houston, Texas, and at the Silver Eye Center for Photography, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It hurt to listen

April 5, 2012

Yellow Sweatered Woman | By Tara Goedjen

Yellow sweatered woman, I saw you before you started crying. You were walking up the street, toward town. I was on my way back from the trails along the cliff, from looking at the three sandstone sisters. You held the leash of a wrinkle-faced dog, and you had brown shoes and crooked legs and gray hair that met your shoulders. You were small and slightly hunched and your dog seemed to know that you couldn’t walk fast, although sometimes he would pull, ever so gently, on his ropey leash, his white paws speeding up into a trot. He saw me and halted protectively in front of you. Your yellow sweater, gray woolen skirt.

When I said hello, the dog ambled over and put his pink nose on my ankle.

Don’t sniff, you said in a Spanish accent. Maybe Chilean. Don’t you go sniffing. You scolded him lovingly.

But look at his face, he’s cute, I said.

She, you corrected. Cute, you said, as if amused. She wants to go for a walk, so we going to go for a walk. You know where I live? You pointed down the road. I left the house and this one started crying, you said. She wants to go for a walk, you repeated.

It’s a beautiful day, I said.

The sky was hard blue and warm. Your sweater was the color of sunshine on water.

Are you from here? you asked.

No, just traveling through.

I used to go all over the world, you said.

You shook your head, your face was close to mine. Your skin the winter skin of a face meant to be tanned.

I been here eight year. But sometime I want to move. Every winter. I get bored.

And you’re still here, I laughed.

Your yellow sweatered shoulders moved. My husband, he’s sick, you said. Dementia. He don’t want to go anywhere. He’s sitting on the porch now. On the veranda. The dog know it. The dog sometimes sit with him. She know something wrong. He used to take her for walks, now he can’t. Your face wrinkled, trying not to cry.

It hurt to listen. To watch. Do you have any kids?

Yes, a son down the road, a daughter in Sydney. My son, he pick up the groceries once a week. My daughter, she want to pay for a nurse. But I don’t want a stranger living in my house. I can take care of him. Your hand at your throat.

But maybe you could try it.

You looked at me, your eyes squinting in the bright day. He doesn’t even want to bathe. You were crying. Tiny breaths. I don’t know what to do, I’m inside all the time. I can’t go anywhere, he sick. The dog know it, you said again. Dogs know when someone sick. I have to take care of him.

Your dog waited, looking away from us, toward town.

Try, I said, you could try it. I imagined a nurse for you, I imagined you smiling again. But, maybe not.

I don’t know. Your eyes were wet. You tell me, I don’t know. My friends say: you need nurse for him. But I don’t know. I can still take care of him. My children help. He’s a good man, you said. All day he sits. You looked down, at the dog. She wants a walk.

I wanted to touch you, give you something. Anything.

Thanks, you said, but you weren’t looking at me, you were looking at the road.

I remember yelling out blessings! at the back of your yellow sweater. I turned away from you and your pale legs—your slow walk toward the cliff. I looked at the porches as I passed them on the street. All of them leading to houses, old and quaint. Gardens and flower pots in the yards. Bushes along the fences. Mowed lawns. The verandas were empty, all of them. There were two cats, black and gray, on a footpath, a young boy playing cricket. No one else. Every house had a porch with chairs, large and wicker, or wooden with pillows. All of them empty. The pillows on the chairs were indented, sunken, as if someone had been sitting there, and just gotten up and left.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Tara Goedjen’s fiction has appeared in journals such as AGNI, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, and NER (“The Orphans of Holy Week,” #31.4), and most recently in Fairy Tale Review and Meanjin. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong in Australia, where she is at work on a novel about ghosts.

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